7 ms·
I thought it was pretty interesting that he no longer uses email. He did use it from (1975 - 1990), and he still works at Stanford. https://www-cs-faculty.sta
by ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
I thought it was pretty interesting that he no longer uses email. He did use it from (1975 - 1990), and he still works at Stanford.
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
- craftyguy 9y agoWell, except he does (or did as of that post) technically use email, just in the most wasteful and inefficient way possible: > My secretary also prints out all nonspam email messages addressed to taocp@cs.stanford.edu or knuth-bug@cs.stanford.edu, so that I can reply with written comments when I have a chance
- kodt 9y agoI had a client who would have his secretary print out all of his nonspam e-mails. He would hand-write his response on the print out, and then have his secretary fax it to us. Eventually they decided to get more modern, and his secretary would scan in the response and send it as an e-mail attachment.
- maxxxxx 9y agoBeing low or no tech is the ultimate status symbol! I remember the only billionaire I ever met didn't have a phone. He got memos from his assistants on paper and wrote his comments on them.
- ghaff 9y agoNot quite "no phone" but I know someone who was and is in senior technical roles at various well-known Silicon Valley companies. He only reluctantly got a (feature) phone--well after smartphones were the norm--when he had a kid and the nanny pretty much insisted.
- Spooky23 9y agoAbsolutely. I turned off my voicemail for awhile and forwarded my phone to the main number. It was liberating.
- johannes1234321 9y agoThe part about scanning is how you responded to faxes in the old days. However the thing about making a quick note on paper and having a secretary who creates a nice reply is way more efficient than messing with mail directly.
- mynewtb 9y agoIt sounds quite efficient for him. I would love to be able to do the same.
- fao_ 9y ago> in the most wasteful and inefficient way possible: I mean, that's a drop compared to the paper waste in most companies. And it's not inefficient. Paper copies make annotations easier which makes replying easier and better quality.
- mseebach 9y agoIf you can't think of a more wasteful and inefficient way to do that, you need to hang out more with government contractors. You ain't seen nothin' yet. Also, this is unlikely to be more than a trickle. He talks about spending a day every three months responding to correspondence, as well as rather making a point out of refusing to respond to unsolicited emails. Chances are that his secretary also simply deals with a good deal of the email in the way, you know, a secretary does.
- svat 9y agoIt is quite efficient for him: he spends a day reading email in “batch mode” every few months, and it saves him the cost of context-switching, and lets him focus on writing his books. (Note that the only email he reads is bug reports: if you send something by email that is not a bug report, he says he ignores it, though I've been able to sneak in an odd thing or two (a comment on a TAOCP section) by including it along with bug reports… the catch of course is that to use this trick, you have to find an actual bug in the books.) The emails are printed for him by his secretary on the back of one-sided printouts, so he's not wasting any “new” paper for the emails. He scrawls (with pencil) his replies on the printouts, and hands off the pile of outgoing mail to his secretary (who only comes in once a week or something), who contacts the recipients, asks them for their postal mail address, and sends his reply by post. It works very well for him, and he doesn't have to waste time filtering email, typing into a computer, etc. He does everything with pen-and-paper (including writing programs like TeX and METAFONT over several months, without typing them up into a computer until the very end), so it just matches his most comfortable working environment.
- vgf 9y agoHe updated his web site quite recently though: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html "2018 began for me with an absolutely incredible 80th birthday celebration called Knuth80, held in the delightful city of Piteå in northern Sweden. ..." So maybe he's just using that email-via-printouts thing as a ruse to avoid having to answer to emails from "important people" expediently? I would totally pull that move if I could.
- lanius 9y agoI like how the old school legends prefer analog. Reminds me of Dijkstra's preference for typewriters.